My Filthy Secret

For years, it was my filthy secret, my private shame. I was allegedly a novelist; a crime writer, no less — a gritty, hard-boiled practitioner in the dark art of killing on the page. I was supposed to be a spinner of the tallest of tales. My books began with the disclaimer, “This is a work of fiction…”

And yet I kept having this problem: I couldn’t make stuff up.

I was bound by the truth, and my truth was that I had been a newspaper reporter from the time I was 14, when I hooked on as a stringer at The Ridgefield (Conn.) Press, my hometown paper. I was weaned off the milk of double sourcing by the food of supporting documents.

Later, as a young professional at The Washington Post and The (Newark) Star-Ledger, I learned that even at respectable papers, the standards for behavior in journalism were far more lax than they were in other industries. I could show up drunk, scream obscenities in the newsroom, eschew regular bathing, all things I watched my colleagues do — especially when I worked in the sports department, a haven for the inebriated, profane and malodorous. All would be forgiven and/or ignored as long as I filed clean copy on deadline. But if I made something up, that was different. Then I’d be fired on the spot.

There would be no equivocation — no memoirists’ hand-wringing about the squishiness of human recall, no postmodernist posturing about how we determine reality, no quibbling about infinite quantum realities or any of the other things professors and grad students spend too much time pondering. The newspaper world has long known the difference between fact and fiction, and it is clear about the consequences for those who stray into the latter.

At first, when I was in high school, getting canned wouldn’t have been a big deal — it would just have meant going back to baby-sitting. But as time went along, the money I made from newspapers became more important. In college, it was beer money (’nuff said). Then, it was my rent. Then my mortgage. Then the food in my children’s mouths.

It was more than that, too. It was about maintaining the sacred trust between the paper and the reader, and knowing that if I wavered I wouldn’t just be destroying my reputation. I’d be taking the paper, and the colleagues who had become like a second family, into the pit with me.

So somewhere along the line, not making stuff up became more like religion. Even when I started writing, ahem, “fiction” — first as a hobby, then as a serious career alternative — those old habits died hard.

For years I felt as if I was merely passing as a novelist. My narrator was a stiff, dorky white guy — just like me. I made him an investigative reporter in Newark — just like I was. I sent him out on streets I had walked to chronicle the kind of crimes that I had covered. Virtually every detail was wrested from real life and given perhaps a quarter turn to protect the innocent/guilty.

The lone contrivance in my first book, “Faces of the Gone,” was that I had the protagonist dating the city editor, a hot brunette — and any journalist could tell you there has never been a hot city editor, male or female, in newspaper history.

In my second book, “Eyes of the Innocent,” I sneaked in one small, fabricated detail: that drug dealers in a housing project used birdcalls to communicate. I had been to that project many times and had never heard a single chirp. But it struck me as a cool thing that could happen. I can still recall the reckless thrill of typing that paragraph. I imagined myself writing impassioned defenses of a fiction writer’s right to literary freedom in response to all the angry e-mail from incredulous readers.

Instead, I didn’t get one.

In my third book, I grew more daring. I had a passage where the protagonist, Carter Ross, is chased by a bear through Newark. I so loved the absurdity of it that I simply couldn’t help myself. I reveled in my devil-may-care insouciance. Again, I braced myself for protest. It ended up being everyone’s favorite scene in the whole book.

So when it came time for the fourth novel, “The Good Cop,” I was finally ready to embrace my inner fibber. I invented a cop-killing gun-smuggling criminal syndicate to serve as the bad guys. I got Carter stoned on absinthe and had him break into the county morgue. I created an intern who is goaded into dipping pregnancy tests into toilet water as a means of determining if a certain house has a plumbing problem.

Some of it sounds ridiculous out of context, but what I’ve discovered is that succeeding at fiction is not a function of what I write, but of how I write it. It’s all about selling the story. Frankly, it was a lesson I should have learned not from my years in the newspaper game, but because I have an older brother.

During our childhood, my brother Greg got me to believe that we were related to the baseball legend Ty Cobb; that buried in the dirt beneath a fallen tree trunk in our backyard were dinosaur bones; and that when he was 5, he owned a motorcycle, which he had sold by age 7.

How did he get me to swallow that bunk? Because I was innately trusting, sure, but also because there was never any doubt in his delivery (Greg is now a lawyer, so his abilities in this area remain well practiced).

Writing believable fiction requires having the confidence to do the same thing. And, in some ways, we have an even easier audience than a gullible younger brother. People who read fiction want to be transported to a different place.

What’s more, I’ve learned to harness the voice of authority I used back in my double-sourcing days to do it, creating a fictional world in which anything is possible. If I want pigs to fly, they can — as long as I have it be the result of a mad scientist who has found a way to splice porcine and avian genes.

I can’t tell you what a relief it’s been. I can now call myself a novelist with the cleanest of consciences. Honestly. Forthrightly. As any proper liar would.

Brad Parks is the author, most recently, of the novel “The Good Cop.”